Michael Dietler

About

Contact Information

(PhD, UC Berkeley 1990) Professor of Anthropology, associated faculty in Classics, of Social Sciences in the College, and affiliate of the Program on the Ancient Mediterranean World, has conducted archaeological, ethnographic, and historical research projects in Europe and Africa. In addition to his work on alcohol, food, and feasting, a major theoretical focus has been colonialism, and he has been engaged for nearly 30 years in archaeological research in Mediterranean France on the indigenous “Celtic” societies of the region and their colonial encounters with Etruscans, Greeks and Romans during the first millennium BC, including long-term excavations at the port settlement of Lattes in Languedoc. His 2010 book, Archaeologies of Colonialism, provides the most recent synthesis of this material, approaching the process of colonial entanglement through analysis of consumption practices, urban landscapes, and violence. He is also engaged in research exploring the use of the ancient past in the construction of Celtic identities and social memory in modern ethno-nationalist and postmodern transnational contexts, and is currently finishing a book on this subject entitled Celts: Ancient, Modern, Postmodern. A third project is ethnographic research among the Luo people of Kenya, in collaboration with Ingrid Herbich, directed toward the socio-historical understanding of material culture, spatio-temporal concepts, and economics. He also teaches courses on the Chicago Blues and has further ethnomusicological interests in Celtic and African popular musics. He is also director of the Migration, Material Culture, and Memory Program, a collaborative project of joint research and graduate training between the University of Chicago and the University of Paris X - Nanterre financed by a grant from the Partner University Fund and the French American Cultural Exchange. He is also co-editor of the journal Archaeological Dialogues, a member of the editorial committee of the Annual Review of Anthropology, and a series editor of the Oxford University Press series Oxford Studies in the History of Archaeology.

Selected Works

Selected Publications

Year

Title / Publications

PDF

2016

Anthropological Reflections on the Koine Concept: Linguistic Analogies and Material Worlds In Material Koinai in the Greek Early Iron Age and Archaic Period, edited by Søren Handberg. Athens: Danish Institute at Athens’ Monograph Series, vol. 22

Feasting and Fasting. In The Oxford Handbook on the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion, edited by T. Ingersoll, pp. 179-194. Oxford University Press.

2010

Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Winner of the Archaeological Institute of America's James R. Wiseman Book Award, 2012).

American archaeology at the Millennium: a user’s guide. Revista d’Arqueologia de Ponent, 11:7-20.

2001

Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power, edited with B. Hayden. Washington, DC: Smithsonian. (Reprinted by the University of Alabama Press 2010).

1999

Rituals of commensality and the politics of state formation in the “princely” societies of Early Iron Age Europe. In Les princes de la Protohistoire et l‘émergence de l‘état, edited by P. Ruby, pp. 135-152. Naples: Collection de l‘École Française de Rome 252

Habitus, techniques, style: An integrated approach to the social understanding of material culture and boundaries (with I. Herbich). In The Archaeology of Social Boundaries, edited by M. Stark, pp. 232-263. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press.

1998

A tale of three sites: the monumentalization of Celtic oppida and the politics of collective memory and identity. World Archaeology, 30: 72-89

1997

The Iron Age in Mediterranean France: colonial encounters, entanglements, and transformations. Journal of World Prehistory, 11: 269-358

1996

Feasts and Commensal Politics in the Political Economy: Food, Power, and Status in Prehistoric Europe. In Food and the Status Quest: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by P. Wiessner and W. Schiefenhövel, pp. 87-125. Oxford: Berghahn.

1994

“Our ancestors the Gauls”: archaeology, ethnic nationalism, and the manipulation of Celtic identity in modern Europe. American Anthropologist, 96: 584-605.